


The Pain-Body Cycle II - Burden

by DetournementArc



Series: The Pain-Body Cycle [2]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:48:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28844079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetournementArc/pseuds/DetournementArc
Summary: Cheryl returns from college, wracked with an unexplained burden.
Series: The Pain-Body Cycle [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2092401





	The Pain-Body Cycle II - Burden

Cheryl dropped out of college in mid-March. She felt heavy.

Abandoning the harsh demands of an art degree, her mind was immediately asunder with different thoughts. Half of her felt so clever, to avoid the greater burden of debt after the presenters, smiling as brightly as always, were keen to remind them that so few of them would Make It, would succeed this rat race to leap through hoops to serve the ambitions of rich men better than the would-be artist next to them. The other half felt a failure, needed to mourn the imagined future she felt stupid for ever harboring.

But then, there was the Weight.

Cheryl liked to imagine herself as not particularly insecure. All the same, her parents would crow at her lovehandles and cankles. Surely this exhaustion was just further proof of her failure to care for herself, further proof of the human misfire that was her adulthood so far.

The ascent up the old stairs to her old room was laborious. The room’s layout was in transition. Whatever sentimentality her family may have held to “leaving the room untouched” was tenuous at best. Her dad’s old movie posters, her mom’s half-completed projects filled the space, and it was impossible for Cheryl to tell if her family was in the process of clearing things out for her use, or if this room was always held in this half-repurposed state.

Her ankles strained from warm, plush rug, to the familiar grain of the wood, to the cold tiles of the bathroom, before pressing her soles down upon the bathroom scale. 186 lbs shouldn’t feel this tiring to carry.

Flopping onto the bed, Cheryl’s mind raced and her heart pounded in a way her sullen limbs evidently couldn’t. Was it depression? Some thyroid issue? A cancer? Cheryl had been an infamous hypochondriac in her youth and strived to be economical in her compulsion to Cry Wolf, but her body and the world around it were always a mass of wild dogs in the dark.

Her family had their own theories. She was faking it, clearly. Or overexaggerating due to her weak composition. Too much fat in her food, so she started to eat less. The weeks dragged on, her family nagging her over the jobs she wasn’t applying for, the future she had abandoned. And each day, she felt heavier still.

It was late November now, the sky outside her window a dark, sullen grey. The poorly insulated house ceded inch by inch to the cold and the frost, and Cheryl’s body worsened. She could hear the groaning of the springs in her childhood mattress, feel the locking stiffness in her back. She checked the scale. 182 lbs., and yet, the scale seemed to groan, its old springs sending the numbers spiraling faster.

The holiday season saw her pick up a job. Her same old job at the same old supermarket she swore she’d leave behind. Running back and forth across the bakery, she adopted the habit of apologizing for the way her pained limp failed to keep up with the brisk demands of holiday shoppers. Coworkers had at first regarded this with a great deal of concern, but it was eventually folded into normalcy. It was clear there was no animosity behind the managers admonishing her performance as the weeks rolled on; such cruel calculations came passed down from on high or spat out from the sterile algorithms of profit, and none would disagree that the increased burden of failure and the threat of termination were tragic, but what could anyone do but bore on.

It was February when Cheryl could not rise from her bed. She succinctly remembered the white, delicate snowfall building up outside; the brief thaw of Minnesota’s late Januaries subsiding to the uproarious last few months of winter. She had felt The Weight increase, so steadily that it could hardly be noted at all; but it was if some invisible threshold had been crossed, and her flesh rebelled. What could she feel but embarrassment as she was peeled from her bed.

The months that followed were tests at the old family clinic, covered by her father’s work insurance, if barely; and then tests that couldn’t be covered, each finding nothing but harbinging ever-growing bills. And each night Cheryl heard through the paper-thin walls the sound of her family, pushed to the brink, sometimes in disbelief and eagerness to accuse her of lying, sometimes in a pity and fear, but always straining under the same impossible burden of Cheryl’s ever-thinning, ever heavier body.

She had to be removed from the home in August, when her body smashed the childhood bed through the ceiling into the kitchen, destroying the table beneath it. She was taken in for study, a terrified animal in a cage of her own skin. She felt the suspension of the ambulance sink down to the asphalt below, felt the cool cot on whatever reinforced frame the doctors had for her. She wondered how her blood could continue coursing through these veins. Was the blood heavy? Shouldn’t the capillaries have caved in? How could she still breathe, or think?

The days bled into each other here, nurses and spoonfed meals and sponge baths and bedpans, ticking away days like the old clocks in her school ticked away seconds.

The doctors would mark the date, April 17th, mournfully as bewildered as they were when this started. Cheryl’s body had apparently started to draw in everything around it, as though the entire facility was bowing just as her bed had. Within a week, the exponential increase of mass had lit up Cheryl’s body like a nuclear furnace, and she fell within herself. In her place, a black hole swallowed all the light of the lab, and continued to grow.

Wherever Cheryl was now, that feeling of burden persisted, that dread sense of a mouth none could feed, a need that could never be met; and the world now was but the pitying but horrified laborers. Physicists rushing for a mathematical solution, cities evacuating, priests and monks and mullahs confiding in their strained faiths, all with the same deeply creased eyes as parents mortgaging their home for the mounting medical bills. Could a hurricane feel guilt? A volcano, regret? If they could, such things would likely provide little comfort, and as such, perhaps it is the best that in that jet black core, the singularity that was Cheryl was beyond the pain of thinking.

**Author's Note:**

> Next time: A Procession of Wounds
> 
> \---
> 
> If it's not clear already, these are very much slapped-together little things. This isn't as... That Way, as the first story, I hope. I'd like to think I'm drawing from my own feelings here, so I apologize if any of this comes across as, idk, voyeuristic or something.
> 
> I have a few more stories like this to crank out. I'd like to think I'm getting something out of my system, but they say catharsis can be habit-forming. Anyway, I hope to write something more positive (or at least structured and complete) in the future, but for now, this has been a decent writing exercise if nothing else.
> 
> Cheers


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